May 22 A rare evening trip

Since all of my charters during the river run are in the mornings, it’s not often that I get out for an evening trip. Today was the unofficial Connecticut Outfitters Employee Appreciation Day. I celebrated by taking Josh and Mike out for some action on the flats. I can’t stand fishing in a crowd and was relieved to see that most of the boats had already come in by the time we put in at 6:30. As we cleared the bridge, it looked like most of the boats were on the east side, so we went west. When we started our drift, there was only one other boat on that side and they were over a mile away. We were into fish right off the bat. We fished Arkansas Houdini’s in 2-5 feet of water with the outgoing tide. There were a ton of fish up shallow, we were spooking hundreds as we drifted along. Josh switched over to a big spook and started getting hits right away, there was something about that rythmic side to side gliding action…

After a while, things slowed a bit and I decided to put a jig on. On the first cast I hooked up with what I thought was a massive striper. After a few minutes, the fish surfaced… It was no striper… I had foul hooked a sturgeon in the dorsal fin. I have seen sturgeon breach on the flats before but had never had the opportunity to see one up close. They are a protected species and really shouldn’t be removed from the water, but I couldn’t get the hook out. We never brought here in the boat so I have no idea how long it was but I’m guessing roughly 4 feet long. We managed to get a few pictures. What a cool looking fish!

We kept picking away at the bass and as it got a bit darker out, the action began to pick up as did the size of the fish… At one point we had a double and very nearly a triple header of good sized fish on. They were all hitting soft plastics. With fish blowing up all around us, the excitement was contagious, Mike couldn’t help but give us his best Skeet Reese imitation.

Josh had a hell of a hit on a spook. The fish measured 38″ and so far is his biggest of the season. The fog really got thick and things got damp and chilly in a hurry so we packed it in around 9:30. It was a great night to fish. Here are a few more pics of some of our bigger fish from the evening: